Category Archives: crafts

I’m not exactly sure what this one is. It says festiggiandosile nozze at the top; looks like a poem, or perhaps a song, but it’s in Italian so I don’t know really. For a wedding, I know nozze. I’m dispatching it here because I liked the multimedia aspect. You can see the poem part is […]

So I did this ketubah recently. It’s round, which is a new thing for me, and it has twelve-fold radial symmetry, and it’s scrumptious (Click the image to see a bigger version). Once it was done, it occurred to me that it would make a pretty awesome clock. You’d scan the ketubah and photoshop out […]

Thing about being an artist: you make stuff, and you make more stuff, and sometimes you don’t have space for some of the stuff any more. On sale: Alef-bets; papercuts; Tefillin Barbie. Struck-out items=claimed already Bibbly-bobbly alef-bets Torah ink, parchment-look paper, alef-bet going forwards and backwards with pleasingly organic curves. 4*6 inches each, framed. The […]

For my job-hunting boyfriend. Find a six-inch square shadow box. Good luck with that; I made this one. Make sure it’s deep enough to hold a shot glass. Drill holes in the back to take the wires which will hold the contents and a hanging loop of some sort. Paint it fire-alarm red and varnish […]

The boyfriend works on glioblastoma. Which is a cancer that happens to astrocytes, so he says. giantmicrobes.com has neurons, but not astrocytes, so I made a plush astrocyte. With a wire skeleton so that all its tentacles are posable, because who wants a non-posable astrocyte, really? It’s purple because all the pictures of glioblastoma are […]

Everyone has a challah cover that says “Shabbat v’Yom Tov,” don’t they? It’s a compulsory wedding gift, I believe. But not many people have one like this. Bwahahaa, geekery. I might post a pattern at some point, if anyone wants it.

Following a visit home, during which old toyboxes were opened and photographs taken, here’s a window into my childhood. I spent uncountable hours making this kind of stuff–not only accessories, but a whole village of wonderful houses, none of which have survived the years. When you’ve seen all this, you should realise that the question […]

The original Tefillin Barbie was a 2006 model with a long denim skirt.* She’s getting increasingly difficult to find, but people are still buying Tefillin Barbies. So I’ve bought a dozen Computer Engineer Barbies to play with instead. Computer Engineer Barbie wears leggings, which is a bit of a change from the frummie skirt. Still, […]

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 The hardest part was getting the braid around the outside right. I wanted it to be just one line, going round and round, but if you just run a sinewave around the edge, you get either two or four lines, and I very much wanted only one line, because […]

Part 1, Part 2 One of the clever things about piyutim is all the little linguistic tricks they use. Rhyme, of course; I tried to use white space between stanzas to show the rhyming structure, but I think I didn’t use quite enough of it. So, there’s rhyme. Then there’s alphabetical acrostic, which I’ve indicated […]